The following article was first published by Square Cylinder in April, 2026.

Sky Hopinka repurposes this expansive exhibition space into a screening room for “Sonic Transmissions.” This solo-exhibition, curated by Gina Basso, features three large screens on one wall, upon which six looping films alternate between single, double, and triple projections, to create a program that lasts approximately an hour in length. Three benches face the screens. Behind those is an installation of related works, including a nineties-era, cathode-ray tube television on a plinth, showing a still image of a hand holding a beaded flower. Two sets of corded headphones snake from that monitor and rest on an adjacent footstool. A light table with assorted transparent photographs stands near the footstool, and a poem titled “Ho-Chunk Holy Song” is inscribed on the wall in black vinyl letters near the gallery entrance. With films that reflect upon resilience, familial legacy, myth-making, and the cultural heritage of his Ho-Chunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseño Native Americans, Hopinka’s dense installation creates an environment of looped and streaming memories where elements repeat elsewhere from other screens or headsets or texts, often occurring out of sync, like cresting focal points of consciousness.

The room, unlit except for the monitor, light table, and screening projections, is painted white — unusual for a screening space. Colors cast by the projections reflect and refract upon each surface, mirroring Hopinka’s cinematic manipulations which repeatedly dissolve human subjects with varied and at times surprising colors. “Sonic Transmissions’” program is free-flowing and immersive, echoing the pervasive footage taken from cars that appears across different films. The program loops without a published schedule, an invitation for us to enter and exit at whim, adding to an overall road-trip quality or to the sense of “tuning in” to a channel of Hopinka’s filmography.

This ease of what we choose to view is at odds with the sheer volume of what is available. Each film asks for one’s full attention. “I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become” (2016), for instance, is a single-channel film that begins with the joyous song of an unseen congregation. The gallery resounds with polyphonic harmonies. Dancers pass across the screen, all but unidentifiable except for the flashing colors their movement and headdresses evoke as a result of special, post-production affects, such that the figures appear to preen into focus, against an environment otherwise blanched with light. The juxtaposition of overdubbed singers and visualized dancers creates a space of ritual where voices disperse into resonant instrumental tones. Sourced footage follows, featuring Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet Diane Burns (1957-2006) as a focal point. Unlike other figures in this film, she alone is fully legible. 

Burns, known for wry, performative poems that deride native stereotypes, appears at the bottom right corner reading a poem about smallpox. There is an element of stand-up comedy to her delivery, a touch of the chanteuse. The film cuts to shots of a darkened landscape, compounding the melancholic mood. Cut next to a black screen with text, and then, there is Burns again, tapping a microphone, singing a song, while an animated red cross stretches and dances across the screen in reaction to her voice. A spotlight passes through her darkened background, spotlighting David Lynch-like trees at night. Burns then fades from the shot as more female voices join her song. Those voices give way to a background cacophony of indecipherable chatter. The self-same shadows of dancing from the film’s opening, colorful movement resume, this time resembling Northern Lights—as though that initial community of figures is more distant upon this return.

Another film, “Lore” (2019), reflects on friendship, beginning with clippings of semi-transparent photographs that accumulate and overlay one another, overwhelming the eye of the camera such that no one image is distinguishable—perhaps in the same way Hopinka’s films stream, accumulating intensity. “Lore” includes a disembodied young man’s voice who speaks in the first person. He describes the quotidian activities of roommates and friends, voice echoing in the space, sometimes to the point of obscurity. The camera shifts to capture a diverse group of thirty-somethings, including the artist, playing an original pop song in a rehearsal studio. Even if the friends stand out in the program with crisply captured faces, the singer’s lips do not sync with the song we hear, reflecting “Sonic Transmissions’” choreographed distance between subjects and the camera. We are consistently reminded that the coherence seen on screen has been fashioned just as figures are withheld from being fully accessible or coherent on camera. The friends in “Lore” are otherwise unusual in that respect, dancing with close-ups on a tambourine, a hand carrying a drink, jean jackets, a blurred out exit sign, and faces concentrated in collaboration. “Lore” serves as a moment of respite—like a stopover on a journey, that nevertheless connotes a mythology of friendship and the capacity of the camera to produce new memories.

Otherwise, films in the program focus on intergenerational transmission and native cultural legacies. “Kicking the Clouds” (2021), for instance, features an interview between Hopinka and his mother about his grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. None of the speakers in this matriarchal lineage appear speaking on camera. We only hear their voices. Hopinka’s mother describes different, generational attitudes towards native identity, owing to her elder surviving a boarding school that, per U.S. Government mandate, strove to eradicate that identity. The camera cuts to lush shots of Northwestern forests, damp and gleaming roads shot from a car, family photographs, and close-ups of intricate beadwork. A melodious and moody pop song by Courtney Asztalos plays in the background. 

“In Dreams and Autumn” (2021) continues Hopinka’s familial reflection, as does “Flesh & Ghost” (2025), featuring archival footage from his childhood, landscape, and animated text. As with many of his films, family members remain obscured through digital manipulation. In this way Hopinka guard-rails the camera’s too-often unquestioned and presumptive intimacy while allowing his subjects to transform into more general, color-soaked exemplars of cultural memory.

In “He Who Wears Faces on His Ears” (2025), the figure is entirely absent save for audio of the voices. The image has been displaced by animated text that turns, scatters, dissolves, and fades out first over clouds, then over a dark background. When the text reappears, it does so in an archival font that repeats twice, once in red, once in white, and—spelling the same streaming sentences, spirals into knots: “Many voices hold the many thoughts around the movement between places and wishes for a better kind of loss,” the text says. “They can’t see the ghosts because to them ghosts are just dead. A better way to hear a song is to listen to the voices on your ears sing it back to you. Tell you what it sounds like and how it makes them feel. When the songs are too long and low, the voices on your ears will make you laugh.”

This last message provides a key to the exhibition, which saturates the room so fully with “songs too long and low,” like the light table simultaneously overlaid with so many photographs that no one image can be seen clearly. If film is typically contingent on linear time, Hopinka disrupts it with the staged works at the viewer’s back. The clipped photographs on the light table are the same as those that appear in “Lore.” The headphones include another looping playlist, including the song performed in “Lore.” These elements engender a sense of enduring temporal disruption—small still points that refuse to dispel in linear time and instead fix in one’s consciousness. One’s memory is thus externalized in two places at once—the hand holding the beads on the monitor and the film in which the beads are revealed. Neither iteration is static and the body contends with itself in relation. In this way, Hopinka diffuses a viewer’s fixed body in space, such that one becomes a light-soaked passenger of memory.